Identifying different link usages

[egekorkan]

We are seeing that link has two different usages from TD designers:

1. Basic linking: linking to the UI, pdf, alternative representation, icon
2. "Semantic" linking: collection, controlledBy, tm:extends

This is annoying for TD consumers since they need to handle two styles very differently. If I am building a graph of related Things, I cannot blindly parse through the links.

Since these two different mechanisms, I think we can discuss splitting those.

[benfrancis]

This is not dissimilar to how HTML uses <link> tags. They may be used to link to other HTML documents (e.g. <link rel="next"> and <link rel="canonical">), to alternate representations of an HTML document (e.g. <link rel="alternate">) or to related non-HTML resources (e.g. <link rel="icon">, <link rel="manifest">, <link rel="stylesheet">).

Is there a reason that a Consumer can not use the rel and type members to distinguish between different types of links, like those described in section 5.6.2 of WoT Profile? Did you have an alternative solution in mind?